Graphics hierarchy

[Ketil Z. Malde]

Keith Wansbrough <Keith.Wansbrough@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> I agree with Ashley - surely we're not trying to write *new*
> libraries, we're just trying to better organise the existing ones.

> 1. not having a shared Image type or class at all (just types PNG,
> GIF, JPEG, etc)

I think that is a good choice, since otherwise you need to make some
decisions that bring you into new-libraries territory.

Conversion between formats would probably be useful, though, perhaps
one could FFI to ImageMagick or something?

ISTR the Amiga having a library called DataType or something.  This
would automatically convert data types from a library of conversion
routines, so that if you wrote a program to read TIFFs, it could apply
the appropriate routine to read BMPs as well.  Or something like
that. 

It seems to me that some of this functionality is the domain of a type
system - can it e.g. be achieved with a generic 'fromImage' function?

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants